Month: January 2018

Guys! You did it! You made it a whole 48 hours. Did you hit your goals? (It’s okay if you didn’t!) Did you eat delicious things and get lots of snuggly reading time in? Your hosts had a great time with each and every one of you, whether you were checking in on the reg or not. And there were A LOT of you. Our previous record for readathon participants was 1,400; this weekend, we welcomed 1,850 of your gorgeous faces to #24in48 with us and all three of us are totally overwhelmed by the love. We had lots of first timers and its so great to see this little thing growing.

OKAY, I’m going to stop being sentimental and get to the business of closing this place up. First of all, we have winners to announce from Hour 42’s Challenge:

Katie.cat.books

Bry Boyd

Felkins (kab-89)

Dan Riley

Natasha Barnes

Jeni Smith

Valeria Gerasimova

Tina Porubsky

Qina Liu

Cynthia Desgagné

If you won here (or during any of the previous door prizes or challenges), go to the Prize Page and pick out your top three choices.

Secondly, we’ll be back for another round of 24in48 on….::insert drum roll::…

July 21-22, 2018

Put it on your calendars, request the time off work now, and get your TBRs ready.

Next, we’d love to know how the readathon went for you. There were some changes this time and a lot of you were newbies, so tell us in the closing survey how this round went and if there’s anything you’d like to see change.

Lastly, if you hit 24 hours, you’re eligible to win one of four prize packs, generously donated by our great sponsors. Fill out the form below to provide proof of your full 24 hours read BEFORE midnight ET on Tuesday, January 30th. We’ll announce the winners of those packs next week.

As always, friends, it’s been a wonderful weekend and from all three of your hosts, thank you for joining us and we hope to see you back here in July.

Whoa, nelly. How did it get to be Hour 45 already? Time flies when you’re having fun, apparently, and we are MOST DEFINITELY having fun, are we not? We’ve got three hours left to the finish line, and you know what that means…

A few important countdown reminders from your hosts:

BREATHE. Move. Stretch. Breathe again. Repeat as needed.

Enjoy yourself — and enjoy that book you’re reading. If you AREN’T enjoying it, put it down! Read something else, go for a walk, give your brain a change of pace/story/language/direction/things to think about for a bit.

This readathon is for you, not anybody else. So someone else read 456 books in 24 hours, and you’ve not yet finished one? Who cares. This isn’t a competition. Have fun with it, appreciate this time carved out for reading, and–most importantly–you do you, friend!

Don’t worry about making or breaking your goals at this point. It’s easy to look at the 3-hour countdown and feel like you have to read for EVERY SINGLE MINUTE OF IT to hit your time goals, but goals are just that — goals — and it’s totally ok not to reach them. I (Kerry) have had readathons where I’ve read the full 24 hours, and readathons where I’ve barely eeked out 3 hours of audiobook, and that in the car while driving to some event or another. It’s all good. Sometimes it’s the trying that is the most important part. (Whoa, we’re getting all kind of deep and meaningful this late in the game, apparently).

We love you all, we’re so excited you’re a part of this, and we can’t wait to cheer in these last few hours with you all.

Our last round of door prize winners:

Trisa @ Absolute Bookishness

Rebecca Simonin

Jessie @ Dwell in Possibility

Jenny @ Reading the End

Allie @ A Literary Odyssey

Jenna Morrison Campbell

Kimberly Nelson

Callie LaFleur

If you’ve won a prize here (or on any of the past hours — don’t forget to check!), you can claim your prize at the Prizes Page.

We are so close to the end! Which means you’re either sad that it’s almost over, panicked because you haven’t read as much as you wanted, or kind of losing it a little bit from lack of sleep. (Or likely all three hashtag readathonlife.)

AND FOR OUR VERY LAST CHALLENGE OF THE READATHON, we want to to see your covers! Find the best book cover and the worst cover on your shelves and post a photo of them on social media (don’t forget to hashtag them with #24in48).

Here are mine:

(And yes, I know the cover for Made for Love is supposed to be terrible.)

Drop the link to your photo in the form below. We’ll pull winners at Hour 48 (the end of this journey!). Until next post, happy reading.

Hour 39 is upon us, and that means it’s time for more door prizes! But first, a few words of love:

You, yes YOU, are amazing. You are a perfect reading machine, a fantastical whimsical book merperson, a beautiful wonderful literary leprechaun. We’re so, so happy you’re joining us that we can’t even quite make compliments that make sense (though maybe that’s just a by-product of it being hour 39, and yours truly (Kerry) veering just a touch to the loopy side of things). But for reals, this readathon is such an incredible event, and it’s amazing to see its growth, and we couldn’t do any of it without ALL OF YOU WONDERBOOKSTARS. Without further ado…

This hour’s door prize winners are:

Sydney Sullivan

Stephanie Hildreth

Regina Renee Ward

Felicia The Geeky Blogger

Melissa Pickford

Lady @ FreeFormLady

If you won a prize here (or on a past post… don’t forget to check!) you can claim your prize over on the Prize Page. And don’t forget you can still enter the Bookends Challenge from Hour 36, which is open until Hour 42. See you all in a few hours!

We’re closing in on the end of readathon, but we’re not losing momentum! It’s the perfect time for another challenge to get you moving and sharing, so get up, stretch, and head back over to your home library.

While you’re walking over there, we’ve got the winners from our last challenge!

Shawntaye Hopkins

Sally Taylor

Ali (@Aliiii0685)

Diana (dnearhos)

Christina Hickey

Cathy Sedge

Jessica Bolton

Alan Compton

Tara Colaruotolo

Abby Mason

For this challenge, we want to see the first book on your shelves, and the last book on your shelves.(Drop your email address and entry into the form at the bottom of this post; you have until Hour 42 to enter!)

I’m always intrigued by the way readers choose to organize their shelves, if at all. Overall, I break things down by Fiction and NonFiction. Within that, I separate hardcover and paperback, and then alphabetize by author. There are a few exceptions, of course; my first bookcase starts out two full shelves of various editions of Harry Potter that my partner and I have collected over the years before flowing into my romance shelves.

I could go on and on, but I know you all would rather see my bookends.

We are well and truly into day two of this readathon, and you are CRUSHING IT. It’s 9am for me (Kerry), and if I know me (I think I do), I’m currently pouring myself a MASSIVE cup of coffee and getting ready for the day to come. We’ve got 15 hours left on the official readathon clock, and we believe in you.

That said, we all know that the second day of a readathon can be harder than the first. Your mind starts to wander, your eyelids start to droop. So get up and move around a bit. Stretch! Walk! Breathe! Then make yourself a cup of coffee (or tea, or whatever floats your boat), focus, and get back to the books.

WHAT UP PARTY PEOPLE. It’s 6am on day two, my favorite day of the ‘thon. For me, day two usually consists of extra coffee, cozy blankets, catching up on the hashtag, and some dedicated hunkering down to try and hit 24 hours.

Wherever you are and however much you’ve read, I’m happy you’re here, and I’m proud of you. Reading for the sake of reading with a community of other readers across the world is the most important part of this weekend. You’ve dedicated your weekend to reading and connecting, and that’s a win all by itself.

To kick off our second day, it’s time for another challenge! Head on over to your bookshelves and take a long, hard look at all the books you haven’t read. Listen to them calling to you. Think about how many times you’ve bought new books and ignored the unread ones you already own.

This hour’s challenge: find the book you’ve owned the longest that you still haven’t read, and share it with us. (Drop your email address and challenge entry into the form at the bottom of this post; you have until Hour 36 to enter!)

I’m a big believer in the right book finding us at the right time, and for me that often means holding onto certain titles through multiple rounds of shelf culling because I know I WANT to read them eventually, I’m just not there yet.

Here’s my entry:

Do you share my habits, or do something entirely different? Do you limit your book buying so you’re reading as fast as you’re acquiring? Maybe you’re like Rachel, and somehow you have three or four copies of a book…and you still haven’t read it yet (no shame, boo, I love you).

We’re sharing our shelf shame here so we can kick it for good. We read how we want. NO REGRETS.